In hopes of helping researchers find business partners who want to build a company around their technology, Rutgers Business School teamed up with the New Jersey Institute of Technology to host the first TechSPARC showcase last week.

The name stands for technology, students, partners, resources and community — all of which organizer Brett Gilbert says play a crucial role in bringing more collaboration to Newark.

“We have a lot of technology available for companies to take and build businesses around,” said Gilbert, a Rutgers professor of management and global business, “but that doesn’t happen because nobody knows about them.”

The goal wasn’t just to introduce inventors to investors, large companies and entrepreneurs. Researchers came prepared with arguments for why their technologies deserved a fair chance to compete in the marketplace.

Those innovations included a natural speech recognition platform, gauze that heals wounds or motion-tracking devices capable of diagnosing autism.

Inventors outnumbered investors and entrepreneurs last week, but that didn’t put a damper on their eager pitches.

Michael Linguori introduced the TechSPARC crowd to Vognition, a natural speech recognition platform developed by his Newark-based startup, What Are Minds For.
“Imagine if a doctor who’s examining a patient could tell the bed to raise the patient’s head four degrees and lower the legs by six degrees,” he said, “and the bed would understand.”

Linguori has been approaching thermostat companies, hoping one of them will use Vognition to make “Turn the heat down to 65,” an actionable phrase for their products.
His appearance at the showcase was a call for consumer electronics and software companies to consider buying licenses for his invention.

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Husband and wife team George Ulsh and Dung Le have had their eye on the medical industry and used the showcase as an opportunity to talk about a recently patented traumatic-injury gauze they developed while earning their master’s degrees from NJIT’s biomedical engineering program.

They say the gauze, made of a material called chitosan that’s loaded with oxygen, helps blood clot and reduces scarring.

“It looks like cotton and feels like cotton, but the moment it hits blood it turns to gel,” said Ulsh. “That oxygen-loaded gel can penetrate the wound and help you heal.”

Meanwhile, neuroscientist Elizabeth Torres, who teaches in the Rutgers Department of Psychology, has been working on technology to diagnose health issues not as obvious as a bleeding cut.

She says her method can distinguish between a person’s deliberate movements, like getting up from your chair to fill a glass with water, from their involuntary movements, like when you flinch if that glass falls and breaks.

Those differences could help doctors diagnose autism or Parkinson’s Disease, she said, and could also be used to analyze the movements of an athlete or dancer.

She’s currently seeking funding to start the next round of tests required before the technology is ready to be commercialized.

The selling point of her technology would be that it adds personal, objective data to a diagnosis process that usually relies heavily on subjective information, like verbal descriptions, and tends to under-diagnose women.

“It’s like your fingerprint,” Torres said. “This could be a very good biomarker for things like autism or even identifying whether people are mathematically inclined.”